The Bunge y Born Foundation (FBB) indicated that “it is a project open to the entire educational community. It seeks to question the present and imagine the future from different dimensions of life in society. It analyzes the scope and scale of the different disciplines to establish the bases of modern public policies, and adapted to the opportunities and challenges that are generated”. We also found the information propitious since tomorrow is International Education Day, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in celebration of the role that education plays in peace and development, understood as a human right, a public good and a collective responsibility.
Ezequiel Bacher, head of communication at the Bunge y Born Foundation, told Rostros & Traces that “Utopia is a project that was born in 2019 with the aim of exploring public policy in the light of exponential technologies, such as the future of work and the transformation of academic disciplines. Utopia is a multiplatform proposal that includes the website, esutopia.fundacionbyb.org, and the podcast that was launched last year. We have been working in partnership with the Luminis Foundation for some time, they work with a podcast called 'Education today' and when they asked us to do a joint podcast we decided to launch 'Utopia'. Each episode reaches a special technology. It concludes with a final interview with the philosopher and thinker Ivan Petrella who tries to take up these technologies from a more human perspective. In each episode there are specialists who try to explain from the theoretical point of view what each of these technologies is, and from practice with the application in a real project”.
Episode 1
Here we share a detail of episode 1 about big data. But first it must be said that exponential technologies are those that follow a pattern of accelerated growth; this means that, in a short time, their complexity is significantly reduced, while their capacity and the number of applications that use them increases dramatically.
In this episode Walter Sosa Escudero, Dr. in Economics, specialist in econometrics, professor at UdeSA and researcher at Conicet, answers some theoretical questions about this technology.
What is big data?
Big data is a technology that is applied to process and store data that exceeds the capacity of a single computer, if the volume of information exceeds the storage capacity of a computer, that information is divided into smaller parts to be processed by a set of computers that are linked nodes to form a big data cluster. Big data is a phenomenon that has to do with the proliferation of massive data, the product of interacting with things that are connected, this generates digital footprints that leave data on human behavior.
What is it for?
It leads us to think of “a lot of data”, which is why it is related to States or companies like Amazon, and it is a phenomenon of large institutions, but they also have a side of common users. A business with social networks can analyze behavior based on how its followers are, and realize that the days when, for example, a bakery brings out an apple pie, people buy more and can use that information to plan when they make cake and when do they make bread That is why big data allows small programmers to operate with big data for people or small companies.
How does big data apply to the past, present and future?
The past has to do with data that has already been produced, which is historical, as an example of measuring poverty. At present we can mention the search within the labor market, for example, or what people think of politicians, something called 'now casting', which is studying real time. However, in order to predict things that have not yet happened, it still has some problems. Based on an algorithm, you don't know when the pandemic will end, or how much the dollar will be worth two or three days from now.
The application of big data in real projects
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One of the projects described in episode 1 is a mapping of Argentine schools, mainly focused on rural schools to make routes and routes visible over time and the difficulty that teachers and students have in getting around. A project of national scope.
The original question to address this project was: what causes the drop in the enrollment of rural students when they go from primary to secondary? Among the variables that can influence is the distance to the schools. Next, Antonio Vázquez Brust, data scientist, urban planner and member of the FBB, tells how they carried it out.
The tool you came up with is a map, now what raw material did you use to develop it?
The idea of making a map is to be able to compare what is happening throughout the country and to be able to differentiate what is rural from what is urban. We take databases of educational censuses, with geo-referenced points, with the exact position in coordinates, of some 60,000 schools throughout the country. The challenge was to measure millions of points across the country, and calculate how long it takes to walk to those schools. Our second input was the Argentine road network, known roads, passages, trails; and finally we simulate walking routes from each of these points to the closest schools, and we find that in many cases it takes hours.
Where is big data in this project?
In this project, big data was not an input, but an output, we generated it. We had 60,000 schools, starting points, those numbers are not big data today, but we generated it when we simulated routes and started collecting millions of detailed walking routes section by section and then processed them to obtain averages, maximum distances and minimum.
In big data there is storage and processing, how did you divide the project for those two instances?
Storage was not an issue because the incoming data volume was not that much, processing was a bit more challenging. We solved it with hardware, a powerful computer with many processors. We created a programming code that automated the work, for each starting point it found the closest school and then did the same work that our cell phone does when we want it to indicate a route, choosing the shortest path.
Utopia is a podcast made up of the following Episodes: E0 Introduction, E1 Big Data, E2 Artificial Intelligence, E3 Blockchain, E4 Robotics, E5 Transmedia, E6 Internet of Things, E7 Programming, E8 Nanotechnology, E9 Biotechnology and E10 Interview with Ivan Petrella.
Finally, Ezequiel Bacher pointed out for Rostros & Traces that with this project "we want to contribute to the transformation of public policies through the training and education of decision makers from the different provinces of our country to apply these technologies in education from an efficient and responsible point of view with our sights set on the formation of our young people”.
By Fernanda Bireni